Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [159]
It was Thalberg’s doing that brought Tracy to M-G-M in the spring of 1935, but not everyone at the studio shared his enthusiasm. Of the nineteen pictures Tracy made for Fox, only Quick Millions and The Power and the Glory were truly memorable, and even those were considered flops at the box office. Tracy got by playing gangsters, vagabonds, and con men, and although he had genuinely distinguished himself as J. Aubrey Piper in The Show-Off, his reputation as a troublemaker was well known.
Metro, however, was in the midst of an initiative to pump up its player ranks, and Tracy would fill a valuable slot in the studio’s fabled stock company. In terms of genuine male stars, M-G-M had only Clark Gable and Robert Montgomery as leading men, neither of whom fell comfortably into the mugg category Tracy had so expertly occupied at Fox. William Powell was in his forties, Wallace Beery nearly fifty, Jackie Cooper just twelve. Charles Laughton was strictly a character man, and Maurice Chevalier was, well, Maurice Chevalier. Franchot Tone and the impossibly beautiful Robert Taylor were being brought along, as was Nelson Eddy, who seemingly came out of nowhere. In March alone, nine players were signed to term contracts, Reginald Owen, Edna May Oliver, Robert Benchley, and Charles Trowbridge among them. The studio wasn’t above acquiring talent that, by Thalberg’s reckoning, had been mismanaged elsewhere—the Marx Brothers and now Tracy being the most recent examples.
A memorandum of agreement between Spencer Tracy and M-G-M was signed on Tuesday, April 2, 1935. It outlined a seven-year deal, calling for five pictures a year at $25,000 a picture to start. The studio would advance $1,250 a week against each film, with the unpaid balance due at the end of production. Tracy was to receive first featured billing after the star or costar, with nobody’s name in larger type. The concluding sentence of the document confirmed that Tracy was not yet done at Fox: “We recognize the fact that this contract is binding only if Mr. Tracy secures a release from his Fox contract.” That same day a meeting took place at Fox Hills. Calls were exchanged between organizations, and the contract Tracy had signed with Fox on November 6, 1934, was terminated “by mutual consent.” Tracy verbally agreed—and M-G-M’s Benny Thau concurred—that prior to April 1, 1936, he would make one additional picture for Fox at the rate of $3,000 a week. Papers on both coasts carried the news of the move the following morning.
“It is understood that Tracy received a very flattering offer from M-G-M and was very desirous of accepting it,” Edwin Schallert wrote in the pages of the Los Angeles Times. “Winfield Sheehan kindly conceded to him and allowed him to go to the other studio.” The Hollywood Reporter added that Tracy’s new contract would take effect on his thirty-fifth birthday. “His first picture there will be Riffraff, the Frances Marion waterfront story that had the names of Gloria Swanson and Clark Gable penciled opposite it on the M-G-M assignment sheet for some time. Irving Thalberg declined to state last night whether Miss Swanson is still in line for the female lead.”
Louella Parsons bested them all when she said there was a “whisper” that Jean Harlow would be starred in Riffraff “and right away because M-G-M is eager to get more of her pictures on the market.” Thalberg was no longer in charge of production, his health having forced him to take on a lighter workload, but he was still responsible for the development and casting of seven pictures a year.
“Spencer Tracy,” Thalberg told Parsons, “will become one of M-G-M’s most valuable stars.”
The Tracys were still settling into their new home on the Cooper ranch, with its chickens, its horses, its solitary goat. Louise thought the house too big, but the expanse